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Fuck the Mall
by Torrey Meeks
I'm not sure what about the girl walking past me pisses me off the most. Is it the frayed canvas shirt displaying pouchy midriff, the lanky hair fresh from the trailer, or the hungry come-get-me look she's shooting every swinging dick within fifty yards?
I'm in the Mall.
In Hot Topic a girl in a vinyl Catholic Nun outfit asks "Is there anything I can help you with?" with such temerity that all I can do is stare dumbly around for my wife. The sex-nun goes on to say, "We have a special on tent stakes shaped like canes, and our iron-maiden belts are on clearance. Kids keep catching tetanus, so our return consumer base is surprisingly low." I stutter something about needing an embolism and crawl over a writhing mass of fourteen year old girls fighting over the last 'Seether' t-shirt, one screaming at the rest, "If you don't let go I'm gonna open my book of black magic on your asses when I get home."
I lean against the glass storefront, my hand right covering the black fishnetted boob of a mannequin designed by some sex-deprived worker of plastics (fresh from a village in China) to have a facial expression he imagined all American women wake up with in the morning with.
The plastic bombshell is all gigantic tits and puffy lips and hourglass hips that'd break Father Time's neck. It's nothing you'd see outside of an airbrushed skin magazine, or the display case of a store that stops just short of marketing whips and chains to fifteen year olds.
The sea of exposed flesh, bad food and ring tones is threatening a full blown psychotic episode. I can't concentrate. I can't remember what I came into the damn mall for.
In the mess something sticks out. Almost everyone's dressed up. It's unreal. Do people actually get dressed up to go to the mall?
I thought people used to get dressed up for important things. Religious days, weddings, funerals, fine dining.
No surprise, I suppose, that most of the people are as immodestly and poorly dressed as the mannequin I was leaning on, which is sad, because their faces say they're searching for some sort of purpose, and that's an elusive beast that doesn't hang out in the plate glass hallways of of an American mall.
When get to our car I sit in the driver's seat, staring out the window, looking at the big blue sky.
"You okay?" The wife asks, pulling stolen rubber Halloween masks out from under her shirt.
"I hate the mall." I mutter.
"Why?" She says, already knowing.
I laugh. Where do I start?
About the author
Torrey Meeks lives to write and writes to live. He also writes to pay the bills and to buy the gas for his motorbike.Read his American Newswire column
